Friday, September 27, 2013

Adam Carolla Snags Suburban (Family) Man Cave

YOUR MAMAS NOTES: Your Mama first heard word that man-centric (and occasionally offensive) comedian, radio personality and actor Adam Carolla had acquired a new house in the same suburban Los Angeles community as rom-com actor Vince Vaughn from Benny Birdie who, he said, heard it straight from the horses mouth on his eponymous and tremendously popular podcast The Adam Carolla Show.*

Before his podcast super-success Mister Carolla previously co-hosted the call-in radio program Loveline with media savvy doctor Drew Pinsky, co-hosted with Jimmy Kimmel the televised man-fest gab show The Man Show, and he co-created Crank Yankers, a silly show on which puppets crank called unsuspecting innocents in an effort to create great and spontaneous hilarity. Last year (2012) Mister Carolla popped up on Dancing With The Stars—he was axed after he unwisely incorporated a unicycle in to a Paso Doble routine, and last year he was the fourth famous contestant "fired" from the fifth season of Celebrity Apprentice. A multi-pronged professional, Mister Carolla has also wrote or co-wrote a number of humorous, social commentary tomes including a couple—Not Taco Bell Material (2012) and In Fifty Years We'll All Be Chicks...And Other Complaints from an Angry Middle-Aged White Guy (2010)—that made it to The New York Times Best Seller list.

Naturally, being the curious monkey we are, Your Mama peeped a passel of property record data bases and made a couple of discreet queries with a couple of well-connected colleagues. It was good ol' Lucy Spillerguts who first chimed in with the confirmation that Mister Carolla and his wife, Lynette Paradise, had indeed spent $2,965,000 on a 1920s hacienda-style casa on a leafy street in the decidedly prosperous but low key La Cañada-Flintridge community that's nestled into the mouth of a rugged canyon about 15 miles north of downtown Los Angeles between the Verdugo Mountains and the Angeles National Forest in the San Gabriel Mountains.**

Digital marketing materials Your Mama discovered on the interweb show the mid-block, single-story residence sits on .56 gated and landscaped acres and has five bedrooms and 4.5 bathrooms in 3,992 square feet of interior space that's already has a soup-to-nuts renovation that blends original, 1920s Spanish-style architectural details with all the modern comforts and conveniences expected in a three million dollar house in an affluent suburban community.

A long, gated driveway passes under a double-wide porte cochere and continues on to the rear of the flat parcel where it makes a hard right and morphs into a parking pad/basketball court in front of the mini-estate's 727 square foot, detached three-car garage.

There's a generously deep front porch and a slightly squeezy foyer that links to the formal living and dining rooms. The former has lustrous medium brown wood floors, vernacular-appropriate (and art-friendly) white stucco walls, a central fireplace, and a magnificent exposed beam ceiling with hand stenciled details and clerestory windows that bathe the room in softened sunlight. The chatoyant wood floors continue in to the adjoining dining room that has thin but still rugged wood beams across the ceiling and three walls lined with floor-to-ceiling French doors that look out on the green, tree-shaded front lawn. Both rooms, as per listing information, retain original hardware and lighting that Your Mama assumes has all been restored and re-wired.

The eat-in kitchen, essentially a double-wide galley-style situation, has more wood beams on the ceiling, a couple of sky lights, high-grade stainless steel appliances, and distressed wood cabinetry that looks to Your Mama as if it was hand-waxed after all the painted was roughly scraped off. It's a look, for sure, just not one Your Mama cares for. We do, however, dig the sea foam green back splash tile that's repeated in a larger scale on the window-equipped bedroom-sized laundry room.

The medium brown wood floors switch to terra cotta tiles in the family room that's lucky enough to have a vaulted wood ceiling with clerestory windows but otherwise seems to suffer from a dearth of windows. Listing photographs from the time of the sale show a smaller den with leather club chairs and fuzzy pillows has more windows but Your Mama wonders if that room is actually one of the five bedrooms. Bueller? Bueller? Anyone? Bueller?

A built-in storage bench runs under a long row of windows that overlook the private, tree-ringed backyard and flood the master bedroom with natural light. The exposed wood ceilings are vaulted and transom-topped French doors connect to a deep, tiled veranda that also overlooks the backyard. Whomever was responsible for the remodel of the master bathroom really went for it with black and white tile floors, intricately patterned Spanish-style tile accent stripes, and a double vanity crafted from a carved wood cabinet that looks almost Indonesian. The zebra-stripe rug that the home's sellers laid in front of the sarcophagus-shaped soaking tub is totally overkill, but who are we to judge, right? Anyways...

The deep and wide rear veranda steps down to an generous expanse of flat lawn that eventually runs up against and wraps around a low, fastidiously clipped hedge that encircles a large terrace with salt water swimming pool, elevated spa, and built-in bar area with barbecue and booze fridge.

Since 2003 Mister and Missus Carolla have lived in a 5,500 square foot Spanish-style house on a private, gated knoll in the Hollywood Hills. They paid $1.6 million for the property and spent another two years and who knows how much money to restore and renovate. The decision to vacate hill top home that has a view of Lake Hollywood may (or may not) have had something to do with the five bathroom house having only two bedrooms. Or could it be they decamped to a more family-friendly house in La Cañada-Flintridge because they have school age fraternal twins and the school system in the wealthy suburb consistently ranks among the top five or 10 in California? Or maybe Mister Carolla, a former contractor, just wanted a new home design project? After all, according to a 2010 house tour article in/on The Wall Street Journal, Mister Carolla has "self-described effeminate hobbies: interior design and 1920s architecture?" (Huh. And here we thought 1920s architecture was a more gender neutral thing. Call Your Mama schooled by Mister Man Cave.)

Whatever the reason(s), does this mean Mister and Missus Carolla plan to sell their former home in the Hollywood Hills, the one where car collecting Mister Carolla has a hydraulic platform that lifts one of his vintage sports cars—say an orange 1970 Lamborghini Miura—from the eight-car garage up in to his canyon view office where there are four flat-screen televisions hung from the ceiling? (Wonder how much that contraption cost?)

Mister and Missus Carolla also own a walled, gated and modestly sized ranch-style residence (with detached guest house) on Point Dume in Malibu that they purchased, according to Your Mama's research, in April 2007 for $3,600,000. Some of their nearest neighbors are Howie Mandel and Emilio Estevez, both of whom have their gated mini-compounds on the market.*The Adam Carolla Show currently holds the Guinness World Record for the most downloaded podcast. It was downloaded nearly sixty million times from March 2009 to March 2011.**Mister and Missus Carolla's new next door neighbors are none other than Mister Vaughn and his wife, Kyla, and their two young children. Celebrity real estate watchers will recall that Mister and Missus Vaughn paid $3,925,000 for their classic, center hall Colonial in La Cañada-Flintridge just this last April (2013). listing photos: Coldwell Banker